The vitascope effectively launched projected motion pictures as a screen novelty n the United States. In late April 1896 the vitascope was showing films in only' one American theater, Koster & Bial's Music Hall in New York City, but the subsequent pace of diffusion was remarkable. By May 1897, only one year later, several hundred projectors were in use across the country. Honolulu had its first picture show in early February 1897, while Phoenix, in Arizona Territory, followed that May.¹ In the Northeast and Midwest, villages of a few thousand inhabitants had been visited by showmen with motion pictures not once but two or three times. The vast majority of Americans had the opportunity to see motion pictures on a screen, and many took it. Their responses were not unlike those that greeted the magic lantern in the 1650s or the stereopticon in the 1860s-astonishment at the lifelike quality of...